iDelete app review

Sometimes I check out iOS app list for new or interesting stuff or apps that are free for a limited time. One of those lists is AppZapp and recently they featured iDelete from ProtectStar (gone). Here is my experience.

At first iDelete looks alright, but both the App Store description and the app itself fail to describe what it is doing exactly. All I know is that I get an iOS alert about a lack of free space when iDelete is at 99% and when it’s done it reports less than 16MB cleared space. Also the backside of the iPhone gets a little hot. My guess is this app generates bytes to fill up all free space hoping iOS expires some caches and then delete those bytes. But 16MB is not much on a 32GB device and iOS settings does not show a difference in free space. However, when I delete the app 700MB is released.

I’m not sure what to make of this. Install, run and then delete the app itself ain’t the right way to do things, but eventually it did free 700MB on my phone. The other way is jailbreaking to erase crashlogs and caches, but can’t be done on iOS 6.1.3, yet.

Update 7 december 2014iDelete is no longer available, but there is a better way, altough a bit of a hassle. On Windows usb-connect your iPhone, install and launch iTools (requires iTunes), go to the Advanced tab, then Clean up button. This should clear the caches without jailbreaking. :-) Optionally also delete the Crash logs.

Because the iPhone’s flash storage, like all phones and tablets, has limited write cycles, an app like iDelete may eventually destroy your phone. iTools simply deletes the files instead of writing to the storage till it is full. Btw, the OSX version doesn’t have this feature and unless you can read Chinese don’t install the app from their own site..